Into the firing line

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Next week a Bali court begins hearing evidence that will decide
whether nine Australians on drug charges will live or die. Neil
McMahon reports.

They face a fight for their lives, but it is not a battle they
will wage together. They can't. To survive, they will have to turn
on one another, forge fresh alliances, abandon former friends. In
short, they may have to try to send others to their deaths so that
they might live.

This is the cruel dilemma facing the accused heroin smugglers
whose trials begin in Denpasar on Tuesday - and it's a dilemma with
only one solution. In the end, the path to salvation may lie in who
can muster the most compelling case for their own stupidity or
ignorance, and for the manipulative skills of others. Prosecutors
are out to prove a brazen conspiracy; defence lawyers will be out
to show that their clients possess neither the brains nor the
bravery to have mounted an operation like this.

I was duped.It was his fault.They threatened
me.I was just on holidays. And this: I had no idea
what I was doing. These will be the lines of defence - weak,
perhaps, in the face of an apparently potent case for the
prosecution, but they have to try something. Anything. Because at
the other end lies a firing squad.

TO ANYONE of the view that you can always believe the evidence
of your own eyes, it was the moment the nine were convicted. On
television screens across the nation, Australians watched a video
as shocking as it was damning, depicting four of the group with
packages strapped to their bodies. Heroin, almost nine kilograms of
it, police said. It was compelling and sickening, because the
immediate reaction of most was simple. They're dead.

Renae Lawrence, 27, and the only woman among the group, feared
much the same thing, though at that point she was not thinking of
Indonesian soldiers with guns. Back then, within minutes of her
arrest on the night of Sunday, April 17, she foreshadowed what will
be a recurring theme of the defence cases in coming months: that
she and the other mules were acting under threats of violence
against themselves and their families.

In those first minutes, Lawrence, from Newcastle, was not ready
to start dobbing. She told Martin Stephens, her friend from
Wollongong: "What's the point anyway. Because if we dob them
in they kill our family and we're dead anyway don't tell
them and they'll just kill us instead and they'll leave our
families alone."

Also in the video were Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj, two
19-year-olds from Brisbane. In many ways, they presented the most
distressing sight. So young they barely seemed of age, Rush and
Czugaj were fresh-faced teenagers who looked like thousands of
other young men for whom a surf-and-beer odyssey to Bali is a rite
of passage. But these two were different: the tape showed them
stripped to their underwear, as packages of heroin were ripped from
their bodies.

And finally there was Andrew Chan, filmed in another room after
his arrest, separately, in the airport. He was smiling, joking,
smoking. He had had no drugs on him. But very quickly, the most
relaxed man in this chilling tape earned a nickname. The others had
pinged him as the Godfather.

WHO were "they" - the potential killers Lawrence was talking
about in the tape? We know now that one of the men she feared was
Chan, and it emerged that another was Myuran Sukumaran. Just 24,
from Auburn , he would be named by Indonesian police as the
mastermind of the operation. Chan, they said, was his enforcer.

On April 17, when the five were nabbed at the airport, Sukumaran
was elsewhere in Bali, at the Melasti Beach Bungalows with three
others: Tach Duc Thanh Nguyen, of Brisbane, Si Yi Chen, of
Doonside, and the youngest of the nine, Matthew Norman, 18, of
Quakers Hill in Sydney.

Soon after the airport arrests, Indonesian police raided the
Melasti and arrested these four, too, and seized 350 grams of
heroin. They had them, the group who would swiftly be dubbed the
Bali Nine.

The task of police and prosecutors now was to tie the airport
group to the Melasti four and to prove they had conspired to
smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia - or, as the primary
charge they now face puts it, that they attempted to export drugs
as part of an organisation. Penalty: death.

THERE are photographs, phone calls, text messages. Secret codes
and clandestine meetings. The prosecution case against the nine
details a conspiracy that began back in Australia, where the links
between at least four of the group are quite clear: Chan, Lawrence,
Stephens and Norman all worked together for a catering company in
Sydney. Lawrence, Stephens and Norman appear to have been friends.
Chan was their boss.

The planning, prosecutors allege, began in March, when Chan, his
work colleagues, and Si Yi Chen met at Roselands shopping centre in
Sydney "to plan the sending of the package of heroin from Bali to
Australia". Chan gave Lawrence money at that meeting, they say, and
on another occasion in Enfield, Sukumaran gave her more cash and a
mobile phone. The next day, he gave cash to others in the
group.

By mid-April, the six members of the Sydney group were in Bali,
along with the three from Brisbane - Rush, Czugaj and Nguyen. What
they didn't know is they were being watched in an
Australian-Indonesian operation. Their phone calls were monitored,
they were followed and photographed. Chan and Sukumaran were caught
on camera together. Rush and Czugaj were snapped in a hotel
swimming pool. Investigators were waiting for them to make their
move.

On the night of April 17, they did. Lawrence, Stephens and the
youngsters from Brisbane took taxis to the airport, all dressed in
colourful shirts - loud and large enough to conceal the packages
underneath. Chan arrived shortly afterwards. They were allowed to
check in and pass through the immigration desk upstairs. Then
police swooped. It was all over.

IT HAS taken almost six months for prosecutors to bring the nine
Australians to trial, a sign of their determination to present an
airtight case and also perhaps of the difficulty of reconciling the
stories of nine defendants whose lives depend on the stories they
tell.

One divide was clear from the beginning - that between Chan and
Sukumaran and the remaining seven, who repeatedly expressed their
fear of the other two and asked to be kept separate from them in
prison.

Lawrence, in particular, struggled. Several times she tried to
harm herself and was described as depressed. Even before they faced
a court, she and Chan were locked in a battle over who would cop
most of the blame. Lawrence said Chan was the ringleader. Chan at
first denied any involvement, then claimed Lawrence was in
charge.

As they prepare to stand trial, Chan is understood to be ready
to present himself as a patsy. Lawrence has made extensive
admissions, police and prosecutors say, but will try to save
herself by claiming duress: the death threats contained in the
arrest video. Her comments when the nine were hauled before
prosecutors in August may have foreshadowed her defence. "We didn't
even know what it was," she said, referring to the heroin laid out
before them. "But even if we did know what it was, we didn't have a
choice."

But Lawrence and Chan will struggle to explain away the
surveillance evidence against them, or the fact they, along with
Norman, Sukumaran and Nguyen, had been to Bali in the months
before. Police say there were two earlier smuggling attempts, one
successful, one aborted.

IT WILL play out over many months and seven different trials.
Chan, Sukumaran, Lawrence, Stephens, Rush and Czugaj will stand
trial alone; Norman, Nguyen and Chen will be tried together. The
trials of all but Lawrence will start this week. The date for her
hearing is still to be set.

Watching from the public gallery, in the seats once occupied by
the family of Schapelle Corby, will be parents confronting the
possibility that their children will die a brutal, state-sanctioned
death. Many Australians will struggle to summon sympathy. But if
Indonesia does decide to take them from their cells, prop them on a
beach or in a forest and shoot them, their fate will leave us
asking: is this too high a price to pay for stupidity?